Friday, September 13, 2013

I love bird's nests, they're one of the construction miracles of nature, but recently I found a vacated "modernist" nest which shows how some birds are adapting to life in the heavily urbanised 21st-century city.

I found this one in a tangle of cardamom and ginger plants,which is not where I expected to find one. However, the tangleis directly beneath one of our olive trees, so perhaps it fellfrom that more predictable spot. Viewed from above it lookedlike a pretty normal nest, a finely woven dish of plant fibres.

I brought the nest back to the outdoor table under our pergolato show it to Pammy, who will probably do a painting of itone day, and by chance the nest was flipped over in a gustof wind, to reveal a very plasticky surprise below.

I love the non-discriminatory attitude of birds to nest-buildingmaterials. When they discovered the thin shreds of plastic Iimagine they thought "beauty, this stuff is light, strong, can bewoven easily to form a base, fantastic!". I know, I know,plastic bags kill birds such as seagulls, penguins and manyothers in huge numbers, but this use of plastic just shows thatthe modern urban world interacts with the nautral worldnot just in one way, but in a complex variety of ways, and the creatures which adapt the best have the best chance ofreproducing and surviving. Sadly, that's Darwin for you.

I don't know which species of bird built this nest, but I neverfail to marvel at their delicate beauty and complexity. I wouldmuch rather discover a nest built entirely of plant fibres, butabove all else I am glad to know that several families of birdsfind our garden a safe enough haven to start a family here.

Hopefully the ring of down around the nest is a sign thatthe babies hatched, grew up and made it into the flying club.

The thing that always gets me about bird's nests is the way that each species is hard-wired to construct a certain style of nest from particular materials. The native peewee (or pied mudlark) for example, is pre-programmed to build a very tidy nest from packed mud. In her current art show, Pam has done a painting of one American warbler's nest, which is built as a hanging basket of Spanish moss suspended in mid-air.In the case of our found nest, the bird's hard-wiring must include a section which is a bit more laissez-faire, saying "find whatever materials you can which can be woven into a shallow dish". I just hope that the little guys made it into the world. And they are free to crap on our clothesline if they like, and chomp our figs and strawberries too. I'll do whatever I can to not get in their way (or wreck the joint) when they're in homemaking mode, and hopefully life will go on this way for many more years.